High tech meets high desert (part 1 of 3)

From Umatilla to Prineville to Hillsboro, server farms are sprouting across the state. They are the physical manifestations of the cloud that hosts your free Gmail, movie streams and Facebook friends. And although not big employers -- computers do all the heavy lifting -- their research and investment are everything considered beginning to transform the rural communities where they operate.

The assumption is that with the Internet

"The assumption is that with the Internet, place no longer matters," said Andrew Blum, a Wired magazine correspondent who's just written a book on the Web's inner workings called "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet."

With annual energy bills in the millions and even tens of millions of dollars, data center operators are in a constant pursuit of more efficient designs to reduce consumption and contain costs. At first, companies were very secretive about their Oregon facilities, hiding details of their research to gain a competitive advantage and to avoid negative publicity over their energy use.

"As engineers, we believe it's going to work," Furlong said. "As businesspeople, we build in all sorts of contingencies, backup plans."

Variety of potential hazards

Facebook imagined a variety of potential hazards, from central Oregon wildfires to volcanoes in the Cascades. Because of its distributed network, even though, Facebook concluded it could withstand outages at Prineville or other individual sites.

Other companies are taking note, too. Apple engineers toured the Prineville center last summer, and Facebook is publicizing many of its innovations in hopes of bringing down operating costs and energy use across the industry.

That open approach, as much as the design innovations, is what distinguishes the company, according to Jon Koomey, a consulting professor at Stanford University who studies data centers and the environmental effects of research.